‘The Courier’: It doesn’t deliver

About halfway through “The Courier,” my wife and I agreed it was a pretty good — if obviously low-budget — action movie. At the end, we were still in agreement: Just what was the film supposed to be about?

According to information on the disc, the movie originally was envisioned as a high-dollar action extravaganza — the sort of film you’d have seen Arnold Schwarzenegger in during the 1980s or one starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson today. Instead, it was produced on a relative shoestring, so we get Jeffrey Dean Morgan. He’s not a terrible actor by any means, but Morgan may be best known for playing Denny Duquette on television’s “Grey’s Anatomy” or the father of Dean and Sam Winchester on “Supernatural” — hardly leading roles.

Also, the disc’s “bonus” material indicates that numerous script changes were made during production. This suggests certain elements may have been overlooked or simply lost in the confusion. After 37 years in the newspaper business, I can assure you that the more something gets changed, the greater the likelihood is that it will end up being botched.

The real problem, though, may be in the choice of a director — Hany Abu-Assad. According to IMDB.com, he was born in Nazareth, Israel, and has spent most of his motion-picture career working in the Mideast. Abu-Assad has directed relatively few movies, and the ones he has done lean toward being documentaries. Considering his background, one has to wonder if Abu-Assad really understands the nuances of action-movie filmmaking that American audiences expect.

Basically, the story is about The Courier (Morgan) who delivers things for a price. What he carries isn’t known, since he makes it a practice never to ask, but it’s presumably illegal cargo or takes place under illegal circumstances. The beginning of the movie has him making a delivery to two men who are holding a woman captive atop the highest hill on an amusement park roller coaster. As soon as they get their goods, they toss The Courier one end of the rope binding the woman — at the same moment she topples over the edge. Yes, he manages to save her.

Being an illicit delivery man apparently isn’t a high-paying vocation. The Courier lives in a seedy New Orleans apartment and patches up his own wounds with Krazy Glue. He’s longtime friends with a boxing cut man named Stitch (Mark Margolis), who worries that The Courier leads such an apparently lonely life.

The Courier is approached by a Russian (Mark Krutov), who wants him to deliver a package to a hard case named Evil Sivle, a hit man nobody now living has ever seen. There are three drawbacks to the job: The Courier has to figure out where Sivle is, he has 60 hours in which to do it and the Russian is threatening to kill Stitch and The Courier’s goddaughter.

Stitch, of course, gets dispatched to that big boxing ring in the sky, but not before arming our hero with the able assistance of Anna (Josie Ho), a young woman Stich had known since she was a little girl. Anna can fly airplanes, which is useful since The Courier has to make trips to St. Louis and Las Vegas while seeking the recipient of the package (Mickey Rourke).

Along the way, The Courier gets captured, tied up in a bathtub and tortured by a charming couple, Mr. and Mrs. Capo (Miguel Ferrer and Lili Taylor). The Courier’s hosts break several of his fingers and then break for dinner. With the Capos out of the bathroom, The Courier escapes, finds a gun and kills them both.

Pretty much from this point on, the movie loses its way. The Courier winds up in Vegas, where it turns out that he’s actually searching for his own past. Unfortunately, until the final confrontation takes place, the audience has no clue that The Courier even has a past, let alone one worth searching for. Also, Evil Sivle turns out to be a pretty cheesy name.

Extras: Fortunately, there’s no director’s commentary. Of course, that may be because Mr. Abu-Assad didn’t understand the film himself. Included is a “Behind the Scenes Featurette,” which has seemingly everyone involved in the production talking about how great it was to work on; extended/deleted scenes and the trailer.

The bottom line: Was this movie even shown in theaters? According to IMDB.com, it most certainly was — in Kuwait and Japan. The rest of the globe, however, had to wait for it to appear on disc. And if you wait another week or two, you’ll probably find it in the $5 bin at the world’s largest retail chain.